Synonyms
by Kuruk
Summary: She has learned how to let him find his own way to her. — Lyra/Silver, Ethan.


_Notes: Ten Silver/Lyra micro-fics written for axolotl over on dreamwidth._

_Characters: Lyra/Silver, Ethan. Some cameos by others._

_Universe: Games_

_Warnings: sexual undertones, violence, language, implications of bodily harm._

_Disclaimer: I do not own _Pokémon_, nor do I seek to profit from this story in any form. All mistakes are my own._

* * *

**i. (Angst) "Dreamboat"**

Goldenrod City's streets are always bustling during lunchtime, but Silver spots them easily.

It would be pretty hard to miss that ridiculous mushroom-shaped hat anyway, but a part of Silver knows that he's been chasing her long enough that the silhouette of her back has been forever ingrained in his mind's eye (or something just as corny).

She's sitting with that friend of hers, the one with the black-and-yellow baseball cap and the annoyingly vocal marill. They're sharing a basket of greasy French fries slathered in ketchup and what looks like a milkshake – strawberry flavored, two straws.

Silver can hear their giggling and laughter over the sounds of midday traffic from across the street, and he feels his stomach twist. It's so disgustingly obnoxious, he thinks venomously.

Across the street, the idiot feeds her a fry and accidently gets a thick line of ketchup on her cheek. She laughs as he looks for a napkin.

Silver tears his eyes away, his heart pounding so hard he can feel it banging against the inside of his chest. Scowling, he gets himself lost in the rush of the surrounding passerby.

He'll never been some kind of stupid dreamboat lover boy anyway.

— . . . —

**ii. (AU) "Reversal"**

Bayleef falls to the ground in a graceless heap after just three hits, and she can just _feel_ the headache coming when the idiot's stupid croconaw starts to celebrate its fluke of a victory with a _dance_.

"Great job, Craw!" the redhead calls. He kneels onto the grass and the thing dances its way into his lanky arms, both of them laughing like overpaid actors out of a cheesy poké food commercial.

She tears bayleef's poké ball off her belt and recalls it, glaring down at the capsule all the while. "Pathetic," she mutters angrily.

Across the small clearing, the boy does the same. After muttering some more encouraging bullshit at the poké ball, he gets to his feet and makes his way over to her.

Glaring, she throws a wad of money at him. "I hope you know that this battle was just a fluke," she bites out, watching as he carefully unfolds the bills and puts them in his wallet. That was supposed to buy her lunch for the next week, but…. She looks away. "Beating this thing's weakness out of it is harder than I thought it would be."

The boy frowns. "Bayleef's a girl." Ignoring her scoff, he carries on in that irritating, self-righteous tone of his, "You should return her to Professor Elm. I gave the police a detailed report about you, and they're bound to catch up to you once you get to Goldenrod City."

"Have you even _been_ to Goldenrod City?"

"I haven't," the boy replies, confirming her suspicions.

Lyra rolls her eyes. "Then you obviously wouldn't know that the last thing they care about there is some stupid kid's claims of something small time like pokémon theft." She laughs humorlessly. "Besides, an inbred country bumpkin and weakling of a pokémon trainer like you? They'd eat you alive."

"My friends and I just beat you," the boy points out.

She grits her teeth and glares at him. "I told you, moron. That was a fluke."

He presses it all the same. "You'll keep losing as long as you treat your pokémon like that. You need to connect your – your soul with theirs. That's what my mom says, anyway."

She turns away. "Please, like gingers even _have _souls."

The boy says nothing in reply to that, so Lyra begins walking away and into Azalea Forest. Maybe if she could find a couple of weakling trainers in there –

Something hits the back of her head, and she wheels around. "Do you _want_ me to kick your ass?" She squeezes her hands into fists for emphasis.

He shrugs and sticks his hands into his pockets. "My mom taught me not to pick fights with girls." And as if that were his lame-ass parting line, he begins walking toward the forest himself.

She considers getting a punch in when he stops beside her, but then he turns to look at her. His gaze is so earnest – so penetrating – that she has to look away.

"We don't have to be mean to each other," he says. "We could be friends."

Rare at is it, Lyra's cheeks have gone embarrassingly pink. "As if I would want to be _your_ friend. You'd just slow me down."

He waits a moment, staring at her in that unnerving way of his. "Have a safe trip," he says softly.

She hides her expression by looking down. "And why the hell do you care?"

He shrugs facetiously and walks away.

Lyra doesn't watch him go. Instead, she strikes at the ground with the worn toe of her boot, staring as the dust she kicked up gets swept away by the wind.

It is only as she is just about to walk away that she notices the wad of bills at her feet.

She entertains the indignant thought of leaving it for a long moment (because she certainly doesn't need charity), but she's much too hungry to be proud. So instead she bends down and plucks the crumpled wad of bills off the floor, scowling at it before shoving it into her pocket.

"Moron," she mutters.

— . . . —

**iii. (Crack!Fic) "Musical"**

Lyra was no stranger to musicals. Whenever a new one opened in Goldenrod City, she was always among the first to see it. Securing tickets to a particularly popular (and sold out) musical was also one of the only instances in which she allowed herself to play the "I'm-childhood-friends-with-the-Champion" card.

It was because of her exuberant love of musicals – and the fact that she was subscribed to the theater's monthly newsletter – that Lyra found it a bit strange that she had never heard of _Vengeance! (The Musical)_ before the letter arrived.

She hadn't been sure what to make of the letter upon receiving it, and this bewilderment had only been exacerbated after she managed to read the cramped script on the letter's top-left corner. It had been months since she'd heard from him. The last conversation they had, in fact, had ended on a distinctly ambiguous note.

"I hate you!" Silver yelled.

"You have a lot of anger," Lyra had replied. "Have you ever considered finding some kind of outlet for it? Art? Music? Maybe acting?"

Silver had glared at her and stomped away after that exchange (like he usually did), but unlike their previous encounters, he did not show up again a week later for a pokémon battle and news about his "rival's" travels through Hoenn.

Still, Lyra had never been one to look a gift ponyta in the mouth (especially when that gift ponyta came bearing front row tickets to the opening night of a new musical). So instead of pondering just how strange it was to receive such a thing from Ethan's self-proclaimed rival and her sort-of-friend, she had gleefully made her way to shop for a new dress for both her and Marill.

Having dismissed her suspicions, it is appropriate to say that Lyra was completely and utterly flabbergasted when she saw the redhead standing on stage after the curtains were pulled back.

Her jaw only seemed to slacken more and more as the show went on. Silver – who was playing a character named "Kamon" – seemed to be in a constant state of turmoil. In the first act Kamon was betrayed by his cowardly father, who was the head of a dastardly criminal organization. After a vicious pokémon battle and two musical numbers about how he would get vengeance, Kamon came across a young boy named Hibiki and his friend Kotone.

Lyra squinted her eyes at the actress playing Kotone, who was decked out in denim overalls and had a particularly stylish beret on over her pigtails. Hibiki's outfit was also familiar – a black-gold cap, cargo shorts, and a red hoodie.

She was torn from her ruminations when Kamon launched into yet another musical number about his forthcoming revenge. This one was juxtaposed quite nicely to a musical number sung by Hibiki that consisted of airheaded, frivolous remarks about how he would become Champion and piggish, chauvinistic verses about how he would conquer Kotone, who joined the rest of the dancers that had run onto the stage.

Lyra and Marill sat through the production in a constant state of déjà vu. She could not deny that she found it vaguely entertaining, however (the pokémon battles between Kamon and Hibiki, though always incredibly lopsided in Kamon's direction, were particularly well choreographed).

It was only when the climax ensued – Kotone kidnapped by Team Missile and Kamon battling Hibiki one last time in order to determine who was most worthy of saving her – that Lyra came to the belated realization of just what this was.

"And now, young Kotone," said Antonio, "you will die. And my son shall rue the day he ever tried to get _vengeance_!"

"You have a lot of anger," replied Kotone rather blithely. "Maybe you should find a creative outlet for that."

The rest of the audience laughed, but Lyra was torn between being utterly horrified at how her personality had been butchered (and _Ethan_ – Ethan was not _that_ much of a skirt chaser) and being weirdly flattered that Silver had taken her suggestion to heart.

When Kamon and Kotone embraced and sang a duet about the power of love (and vengeance), Lyra decided to go with the latter.

— . . . —

**iv. (Crossover) "Godfather"**

There had been a joke among Silver's siblings about how he looked nothing like their father.

Lyra remembers looking forward to this joke all night during the family dinners Silver had been unable to get out of. She always felt uncomfortable around his family, even after they were married. Back then, that joke was one of the only ones that was told in plain English, untouched by the lively cadences that were so foreign to her. Lyra knew that this was done intentionally; Silver's brothers took a great and somewhat resentful relish in reminding their youngest sibling that he was more Yankee than Sicilian. They always disapproved of the choices he'd made – going to college, dating a non-Italian WASP, rejecting all ties to the family business – and telling that joke was their way of reminding him of that.

Nevertheless, Lyra always laughed along with them whenever the joke was told. This was mostly because it was one of the only jokes she could really understand, given her non-Italian sensibilities, but a part of her had always taken great pleasure in the fact that they were right. Silver was nothing like his father, and Lyra was proud of that.

But when she walks into her husband's office, the sight of him behind that dark mahogany desk with his hair slicked back with pomade makes her think of another man entirely.

Lyra had only seen her father-in-law in such a position once, but the image had seared itself into her skull all the same. And perhaps the irony of the fact that those siblings of his are gone – brash Green shot to death outside a tollbooth, bumbling Gold disappeared as if he never existed – has finally begun to sink in.

"I'm very busy, dear," he says without looking up from his work.

Lyra says nothing, and tries one last time to see a sign that the boy she met, the one that swore that he was not his family, was still in there somewhere.

She thinks of the blood on his hands, of the baby she'd gotten rid of so that she could be free of him and his family. "I'm leaving you, Silver."

— . . . —

**v. (First Time) "Triangular"**

"I think we should have a threesome."

Silver splutters and drops his coffee mug. "_What?_"

"I'm serious," Lyra says. She tears a generous amount of paper towels from the roll and bends over to blot at the puddle of hazelnut-scented liquid. "C'mon, you can't honestly say that you haven't thought about it."

He hasn't. If he is being completely honest, however, he would confess to being so nervous about sleeping with Lyra before the first time that he could barely go forward with it. The thought of adding another person, well….

Lyra rises and tosses the sopping wet paper towel into the bin. "It's not like I'd invite just anyone to join us," she continues. "It would be someone special – someone we both trust."

There's a lump in his throat that won't go away no matter how many times he tries to swallow it away. "So you're – what." He averts his eyes. "You're dissatisfied with our relationship or – something?"

Lyra's response comes immediately. "No! Of course not. It's just – well. It's always been a fantasy of mine, sort of." She puts a hand on his shoulder, her fingers rubbing small circles against the fabric. "I would only do it if you're comfortable with it, though."

There is a lull in conversation as Silver weighs his options.

"W-who did you have in mind?" he asks.

"Ethan."

Silver's cheeks are positively crimson. "The kid with the marill?" In all honesty, he thought she would have another girl in mind.

"Stop calling him that," Lyra scolds. "You've met him before; you two should be on a first name basis."

He scoffs. "Yeah, well, we should have met a lot more times and be on something better than a first name basis if I would even think about letting him sleep with us!"

Another pause.

"So that's a no?" Lyra asks, her voice small.

Silver scowls as the guilt prickles at his conscience. "Yes – no." He runs a hand through his hair. "I don't know."

"Do you want some time to think about it?"

"Whatever," he grumbles.

Lyra nods, turns, and grabs the coffee pot off the counter. When she turns around again, she is smiling. "I was thinking of visiting Mt. Moon tonight." She hands him the mug of coffee she just poured him. "Maybe watch the clefairy dance?"

Silver's cheeks are still flushed. "Okay."

Maybe he shouldn't have agreed to this.

Ethan is sitting at the table across from Silver, petting his ever present marill nervously. Lyra looks at both of them with something between expectant and nervous.

"I want everyone to be comfortable," Lyra says. She twirls a finger through her left pigtail, her eyes flitting between the two of them. "So –"

Sighing, Silver reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of Lyra's. He shoots a look at the other boy, who blinks back anxiously.

It takes Ethan a few seconds, but he reaches to put his hand atop theirs. His palms are a mixture of rough and soft – a midpoint between Lyra's delicate hands and Silver's calloused ones.

Silver's cheeks are hot. "Could you recall the marill already?"

"Oh," Ethan says, his eyes wide. "Sure."

Lyra laughs, and Silver feels just the slightest bit more comfortable at the sound of it.

His lips quirk in the slightest of smiles.

Across the table, Ethan's do too.

— . . . —

**vi. (Fluff) "Home"**

After a year or so of traveling together, they returned to Johto and rented a little apartment.

The fact of the matter is that Lyra could have afforded a much bigger apartment with her Champion winnings alone, but Silver didn't feel right with paying anything less than half the rent and utilities. Getting him to pay that little was already a struggle, and even though Lyra longed for a bigger kitchen and a washer and drier of their own at times, she realized early on that she didn't need a bigger apartment to be happy.

It took Silver a little while longer to come to that realization. He worried about things, in that proud, almost passive aggressive way of his for a while. Some nights he would toss and turn, and when the mornings came he would almost always be quick to rise, shattering the lazy calm that Lyra so enjoyed sharing with him.

Silver was cagey and nervous without the constant flux of travel acting as a buffer, so she gave him his space for those first few weeks, intent on letting him find his way to her the way he always had.

And slowly, ever so slowly, he did.

When Lyra smiled at him over one of the young adult novels he so loathed, Silver would offer her a grin in return. Brief touches of their hands lasted longer because he would not pull his away so quickly.

And on those lazy mornings, their bodies tangled on their tiny, ratty little mattress, he would allow himself to just bask in it with her.

Lyra laid her head on his chest, her eyes filled with the steady beat of his heart. "Welcome home," she said.

Silver didn't say anything in response, but the warmth in his eyes was all the reassurance she needed to know that he nderstood.

— . . . —

**vii. (Humor) "Perspectives"**

The finer details of how Lyra and Silver ended up together varied depending on who was asked.

According to Ethan, it was mostly his doing. "Silver was too much of a little torchic to actually do anything about, like, this _monster_ crush he'd had on Lyra since they met," he said smugly. "And Lyra was way too dense to notice that the reason he was always blushing and stuttering like a dumbass was because he _liked _her. So what did I do about it? Well, I kept inviting both of them along on outings and stuff. Like that one time that we went to the movies." He snorted, as if remembering something particularly funny. "Silver almost choked on a popcorn kernel that day. When he got that shit out of his throat, damn, I thought his face would burn off. He was _so_ red."

Silver preferred to recite a different version when asked, but the fact that he did not like being asked at all made hearing his retelling much rarer than the other's. "Lyra liked me. I thought she was okay." At this point, he scowled when Lyra elbowed him at the 'okay' remark. "Okay, I thought she was…." His face reddened. "Whatever. I was difficult as a kid, so when I finished growing up and Lyra and I were still battling every Monday and Wednesday it was, well, it got pretty obvious. So I asked her on a date."

Lyra's version, while much more animated and flattering to both parties, tended to be long and detailed. "Well, Silver and I met when we were both ten. He was standing outside Professor Elm's – do you know Professor Elm? Ah, he's basically the Professor Oak of Johto! Yeah! Anyway, where was I? Oh, right – so he was standing outside Professor Elm's lab, and when I went to introduce myself he shoved me away! And I was, like, what is your deal?"

Silver sighed. "You'll never get over that, will you?"

"It's part of the story!" said Lyra.

After a very detailed account of all their interactions from the first time they met to their first date, Lyra would wind down in her retelling and look at Silver with warmth. "I never thought I would end up with him, but I really wouldn't have it any other way."

"I'm gonna hurl," Ethan protested.

Silver punched him hard in the shoulder to stop him from making the annoying gagging sounds.

— . . . —

**viii. (Hurt/Comfort) "Captivity"**

"Archer said we couldn't lay a finger on you, but he never said anything about your little girlfriend…." The administrator traces a gloved finger along the swollen skin around her left eye. "Did he?"

She stays silent, but her form begins to tremble. The movement is so slight that it is almost imperceptible, but Silver can see it.

The Rocket admin must see it too, because his smirk grows wide enough to crack his entire face open. He pauses in his circling to stand behind her.

Silver feels like he is about to be sick. "Don't touch her." And damn it, the quiver in his voice makes him sound pathetic.

Proton clucks his tongue, his eyes alight with mirth. "You're in no position to give orders." He pulls at her hair hard, almost as if he were trying to reinforce this statement. "This is what happens when little brats try to play hero," he says over the sound of her whimpers.

"Let her go!"

"No," Proton retorts, and it would sound childishly petulant if he had not just pulled a knife out of his pocket.

She is starting to panic in earnest now. Her eyes are widening in terror, her breaths shallow and quick.

It reminds Silver of that time he was starving and cornered an injured rattata in the forest. The look on her face now looks just like its did right before….

The point of the knife pricks at the skin of her throat, and she cries out, her voice straining.

Silver struggles to get free, the metal of the cuffs digging into his wrists. His throat burns with stomach acid. "I said _don't_ touch her!"

But Proton is not listening. "I want you to look your little girlfriend in the eyes and tell her that everything is going to be okay. Can you do that?"

Blood, warm and thick, drips into Silver's fingers. "Don't you dare give me orders, you sick fuck –"

The knife is placed so that its serrated edge lies against the width of her throat, and the acid spews out of Silver's mouth. He doubles over with tears burning trails down his dirty cheeks, the metal slicing into his palms now.

Proton continues to speak, his voice calm and frighteningly flat. "Let's use our noggins here, okay kids? You're down in the basement where no one can hear you. No cops are coming, and we're in control of the whole damn town." Something bright and angry flares in his eyes now. "Do you really want to piss off the guy with the knife? _Huh_?"

Silence for a few moments, save for her frantic gasps and the strangled sound of his dry heaving.

Silver looks up when his stomach has finished its spasms, strands of greasy red falling in front of his eyes. "I'll _kill _you."

Proton pulls at her hair again and uses the leverage to reveal the entire length of her neck. "Don't be difficult; just tell her it's going to be okay."

"You don't get to –"

Her voice is so small and cracked that he almost misses it. "P-please…" Lyra croaks.

Something he had not even know was there breaks in him at the sound.

Silence again.

"It's… it's gonna be okay…."

Proton is beaming now. "Look her in the eyes."

Silver does; he sees that she is crying, the tears leaking through the mottled skin of her left eyelid.

His body goes slack against his restraints. "It's gonna be okay."

"_Promise_ her."

"I p-promise you."

They stare into each other's eyes in the dingy fluorescent lights for what seems like an eternity.

Lyra closes her eyes. "I-I… believe you."

Silver throws up in earnest.

— . . . —

**ix. (Smut) "Tactile"**

Lyra's fingers ghost over his side, leaving a trail of goose bumps in their wake.

His breath hitches, the exhale trapped between his face and the fabric of his shirt. He's embarrassed, because he's nervous and if anyone were to walk in and see –

"Relax," she whispers. Her breath is warm against his bare stomach, and his abdomen twitches and jerks in startled reflex at the sensation. "Relax," she repeats, her tone soft.

Silver tries, but when she begins pressing her lips to his chest and fluttering her eyelids so that they brush against the skin above it, he can't really help it.

She laughs, though not unkindly. "Who knew you were this ticklish?"

His face feels like it's on fire, from his nose to the tips of his ears. "I'm _not_ –"

She mouths something – words, nonsense, _who cares_ – against his skin and all coherent thought stops.

— . . . —

**x. (UST) "Disguise"**

She walks into the Radio Tower, closing her eyes as the blast of air conditioning hits her in the face. The uniform is rough and a little scratchy against her skin, but this must be one of the best ideas she has ever had.

There are grunts directly ahead of her, and Lyra steels herself for confrontation, hoping that her disguise is as good as she thinks it is. She takes a step forward, then another, and tries to focus on imitating the smug swagger of that administrator who the grunts seemed to be afraid of, the one she'd encountered back in Azalea Town.

The grunts look at her, and she almost stops walking. She catches herself before she can though, continuing on and schooling her face into a non-expressive, stony mask.

Then there is a crash.

She turns towards the commotion, and suddenly wishes she hadn't.

That boy – Silver – is standing there, breathing hard and glaring at everyone in the room.

Lyra tries to avoid his gaze, but his eyes lock onto her like she has a tauros's eye on her forehead or something.

"You!" Silver shouts, pointing right at her.

She tries running, but he is already hot on her heels.

How things shift from being chased around the lobby to having her disguise torn off in front of all the grunts – well, no amount of retrospection will ever clear that up.

All Lyra knows is that somewhere between tripping over an inconveniently placed chair and having the uniform's tunic torn by Silver's insistent hands that the entire situation shifts, somehow.

Silver is straddling her, his legs on either side of her thighs. His hands tremble around the hem of the tunic, his face almost as red as his hair.

Lyra's face is red as well. She holds her breath as Silver stares down at her, something foreign and indefinable shining dully in his eyes. She had never noticed – never noticed how _red_ Silver's hair was….

The boy pulls away and gets to his feet, looking at anything but her. "O-only w-weaklings would t-try to use something as pathetic as a disguise!"

He peels away at a frightening pace after that, leaving Lyra to look on in bewildered confusion.

That shift hangs over her; she is so aware of it that it is almost palpable in the air around her. She doesn't know what has changed, but it hovers and skirts across the edge of her mind, waiting to be discovered.

Maybe if she waits a while it'll make sense.

She gets to her feet and calls Quilava out of his ball.

Until then, she has work to do.

* * *

_A/N: __My gratitude goes out to the readers. Thank you for taking the time to read this fic. Reviews and feedback are always appreciated._

_I hope you enjoyed reading this piece as much as I enjoyed writing it._


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